The Brothers of Gwynedd (71 page)
"Some country kern had moved you to the side of the road and tumbled you there. Not wanting," said Godred simply, "to burden himself with some powerful man's discard. Can you blame him? You were bleeding from the scalp like a spring in spate, and all it wanted was a handful of cloth to staunch it. It's clean and drying now."
"It seems," I said, "that I owe you my life." For such a creature, abandoned in such a case the night over, might well have died for want of staunching, for want of warmth, for want of a draught of water.
"A debt I had to you," said Godred softly, and his full brown eyes, golden-innocent in the firelight, burned brightly into mine. "Now it is paid, perhaps. If we need talk of debts and payments, being close as brothers." He leaned and folded the cloak closer around me, for the small hours of the night brought a pure, silent chill into the air. "How could I ever have faced Cristin," he said with measured sweetness, "if I had let you perish by the roadside?"
Close as brothers we were on that journey we made together, Godred and I. For two days I could ride but for a short time, and we made slow progress down the border, and often were forced to halt for rest. And after his fashion he looked after me well, though for his own practical ends. For having decided his best interest lay in abandoning one master, he fully intended to ingratiate himself as quickly as possible with a new one. As for Cristin, it was plain to me, while all else was a cloud and a dream, that she played no part in his decisions, and counted for nothing in his plans, except where she could be useful to him. For he had left her without a word when he made up his mind to go with David to England, and he made no effort to go back to her or set her mind at rest now that he had changed his purpose. It was I who made shift to write a letter, when we halted at Valle Crucis, and beg the prior to have it sent to her at Neigwl, telling her both Godred and I lived, and were on our way to the prince in Maelienydd. I told her also that David was gone into Chester. There was no help for it, soon it would be common knowledge through Wales, and a national shame.
In those summer nights Godred and I spent together, out of doors, we two alone under the moon, he sat close and watched greedily, either with his shoulder warm against mine, or eye to eye with me across our little fire. There was no escape from him, for I was his key into a new chamber in fortune's house, and he was ever busy with the latest wager and the new-fangled hope. But there was more in Godred's kind and solicitous care than that. For he who never thought to write word or send message to Cristin never ceased to talk of her to me. Of her qualities, of her charms, of his luck in having her to wife. The darker the night, the more his tongue ranged into the intimacies of love.
"They say," he said, softly marvelling, "there are wives who have no love for being loved, but only suffer it as a duty. Not so Cristin! Welcoming and warm she is, a true consort. And who sees her only clothed, he cannot know how beautiful!" He leaned so close that his flaxen hair brushed my temple, and sighed his blessedness into my ear. "Pardon me, if you feel I offend in speaking so of my bliss. I do so only to you, who have rights in her and me both. I could wish you the same happiness I enjoy. Who deserves it more?"
So it went, and ever I put him off with stony indifference, whose heart he pierced and parted and played with as a musician with an instrument. And ever it grew upon me that he tortured not only me, but himself also, and seeing how little he considered or seemed to value her, that was a thing incomprehensible to me. Can men be jealous of what they hold so lightly? I had never thought so. But perhaps when they perceive that another creature treasures what they despise, then the possession held in so slight esteem becomes a jewel to be guarded. But then I was also lost, for no man knew so well as I that he had suffered nothing by my means, for Cristin was as I had first found her, pure as crystal and gold. And it seemed to me that all his intent, increasingly frantic and greedy, was to urge on me the possibility, the desirability, the necessity of possessing and spoiling that purity. Nor did he urge it now by way of wooing my favour, as once he had lightly and pointedly offered her to me, but with the fury and furtiveness of one begging for the only food that might keep him from dying.
I was still too innocent then in the complexities of love, which had been to me as simple and clear as it was mortal, to understand that to such a man as Godred, who had cuckolded many husbands in his time with never a second thought, it might not be a matter of great moment to be cuckolded himself in the same manner. In the flesh! But to be cuckolded in the spirit, to behold his wife loved without sin and loving sinless in return, this was the width of hell beyond forgiveness. Godred
desired the lesser offence, to have her his equal and me his fellow.
I think in those days he even ran the risk of growing to the point where he might have become her equal, for I think that never before had any experience of his life been able to enlarge him to contain such suffering. Of his mind and motives I understood nothing. His anguish was an open book to me, the mirror image of mine. And daily and nightly I perceived how like we were to each other, he the bright image and I the dark of the same impress.
Sometimes by our camp fire he sat turning and turning the silver ring on his little finger, until it seemed to me that he and I were bound within just such a circlet, breast to breast, and could never get free one from the other.
But this uncomforted companionship ended, mercifully, earlier than we had expected, for at Strata Marcella, expecting still to have a day's march between us and Llewelyn, we rode into a courtyard full of his men, and a guesthouse peopled with his officers. The first we encountered in the stables told us that all the river crossings were secured, the army of the reform moving methodically eastwards into England, and the prince, at their earnest desire, was pushing north by forced marches to besiege and destroy the long-spared castle of Diserth, to prevent the garrison of Chester from making any move to alleviate the pressure on the royal forces elsewhere.
"He has been asking for you at every halt," they told me. "Go to him quickly, he'll be glad of you."
But not of my news, I thought. And then, as I had not earlier because of my confused brain and the grief of my body and mind, I realised how slow we had been on the way, and knew by their faces that there was very little I had to tell Llewelyn. The news had reached him first not from Wales, but from England, by word from his allies in the march. What I could add might well be some alleviation of what had been done to him. For I knew, better than any other, that it had been done not in self-interest, and utterly without joy.
"Take me in with you," said Godred eagerly in my ear. "Speak for me now!"
I said I would speak for him, but not now, that for this moment he had no part. But only very reluctantly did he leave go of my arm, and let me go in without him to the guest-hall of the abbey, where Llewelyn was.
He had left the great chamber, and made use of a small office there, for there were some civil complainants from those parts who prayed audience with him. When I came in he sent the last of them away, and made me sit down before him, for I was still bandaged about the head, and no doubt showed in no very glorious case. He held me pinned to face the light, and eyed me hard, and when he took his hands from my shoulders and turned away from me it was with a rough, abrupt movement, as though in anger.
"There is little you have to tell me of him," he said, not looking at me. "I know where he is. The word came into Shrewsbury faster than you could bring it, marked as he has marked you. My bailiffs already administer his lands, and his tenants have pledged me their fealty. Nevertheless, speak, if you have anything to tell me. I am listening." And again he said, not harshly but with a bleak simplicity that pricked me more deeply: "The truth, this time. I want no shielding lies."
I said, with a steadiness at which I myself marvelled, that I had never lied to him but by silence, never even kept from him what was knowledge, only what was misgiving and suspicion.
"Have I no rights even in those?" he said.
It was just, and I was ashamed. For if I was indeed his man, as David said with bitterness, I owed him even my doubts and fears, and his armour was incomplete without them. I said, faintly by reason of my weariness and self-reproach: "In anything that is mine you have rights, and nothing that is mine will I ever again keep from you, not even my despair."
"God forbid," he said, "that you should suffer any so extreme grief as despair, and not share it with me. Never deprive me, Samson, of what is mine by alliance. You are the closest friend I have, and damage to you is damage to me."
I said that I accepted that gratefully, but that I had yet somewhat to say to him, in all good faith both to him and to David, as God watched and judged us all. And thereupon I told him, as fully as to my own soul, all that had happened between David and me. What there was to say for him, I said, yet not urging. Llewelyn must take his own stand, but at least upon all the evidence.
He heard me out without question or exclamation, with darkened but quiet brows and attentive eyes. He said: "You know where we are bound now?"
I said that I did, that we went against Diserth and Degannwy, to destroy them, and to pin down the garrison of Chester from moving south to King Henry's aid. And David was in Chester and a part of that garrison. By the prince's face I knew his mind.
"With the better will," he said, "since he is there. I am a bolt loosed at his heart now, for your sake and for mine, and no use to tell me that you forgive him, for I do not forgive. Both those castles I will raze, and drive on to Chester if I can, and if he move on somewhere else I will go after him there. Once he stirred up civil war against me, and I mistakenly held him a misguided tool, who by his own confession was the contriver of all. Now he betrays me and Wales together, and if you think I burn only for Wales, Samson, you do me too much honour, for I am flesh like you. He has not only turned his coat and discarded his fealty, he has preferred Edward before me when it came to the proving. And if he come forth out of Chester in his new cause," said Llewelyn with soft ferocity, "and cross my path, I will kill him!"
And truly he believed utterly in what he said. I was the one, not he, who knew that he neither could nor would be the death of his brother. Far more likely, far, that by some fatal, circuitous road David would be the death of him. And since I was pledged now to keep nothing from him, and he to receive and consider whatever I so delivered, I spoke out what was in my mind.
"Have you still in remembrance," I asked him, "what he said to you after the field of Bryn Derwin, when he stood unhorsed and bruised and at your mercy?
"Kill me!"
he said.
"You were wise!"
Not defying, not challenging, rather warning and entreating you for your own life, knowing what he had done against you, and might do again. Do you remember?"
"Kill me!"
he said.
"You were wise!"
Not defying, not challenging, rather warning and entreating you for your own life, knowing what he had done against you, and might do again. Do you remember?"
He said: "I remember," and his eyes burned upon me, their deep brown quickening like fanned embers.
"So much he knew of himself," I said, "even then, and so much he valued you and desired your better protection in his own despite. It is all the justification he has, but it is enough. He knows himself and you. Neither you nor I will ever know ourselves as he knows David, or each other as he knows Llewelyn. As often as his right hand launches a blow against you, his left hand will reach to parry it, and his voice will cry you warning:
'Kill me! You were wise!'"
'Kill me! You were wise!'"
"You read this," said Llewelyn darkly, "as a reason why I should not kill him?"
"Far be that from me!" I said. "It is fair warning enough of perpetual danger, and the best reason why you should! But it is also the absolute reason why you never will."
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